


Filling the Silence

by ToTillAGarden



Series: Davenport Week [5]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, davenport week, im later than ive ever been!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2019-01-09 17:37:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12281256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToTillAGarden/pseuds/ToTillAGarden
Summary: Davenport learns to sing again, and Lucretia learns not to take his singing for granted.





	Filling the Silence

**Author's Note:**

> 5 days down, 2 more to go!
> 
> This is a fic I actually started a while back and then ended up finishing for this purpose - the prompt was stutter/joy, and while it's a stretch I think I did the latter!
> 
> I'll see you tomorrow, but first:  
> Thanks for sticking with me through it all! I know it's not over yet but honestly your feedback has been amazing but also really interesting? I'm sometimes really surprised by what you get out of my fics and which ones you like better and which ones you like less, and it's like. Both a thought experiment for me and a joy to see all of your comments!  
> I like. Thrive off of this stuff, so keep doing what you do~!

Davenport sang in the shower. It was something that he just couldn’t hide after a few months into their first cycle; he loved opera and choral music and show tunes and he sang them loudly, and while he could stop himself for the two months the trip was supposed to take he couldn’t help but fall into old habits once their journey become longer. As the cycles went on he added to his repertoire - most worlds they encountered on their cycles had new music for him to learn, and, after their year in the conservatory, he began writing his own songs as well - so by the end, no one could complain about hearing the same thing too often. Yet no one complained regardless; they joked about it, sometimes, but it helped him de-stress, it was _good,_ it came from the heart, and it reminded them of things long gone. So he sang in the shower at first, and as time went on he hummed while cleaning or doing his laundry and whistled while repairing the ship and sang while he was bored or drunk or whenever he was happy; not a day went by without him singing sometime, but it was the singing in the shower that everyone heard, no matter where on the ship they were, and Davenport wouldn’t miss a day of singing for the world.

So it was strange, of course, when he no longer could.

~

When Lucretia wiped his memory she didn’t realize that was another thing she would feel was missing.   
But he had forgotten that he sang and how to sing and he didn’t know any songs for a while, so the nights became quiet and the silence haunted her. She would hear the water running and occasionally jolt in fear, because his voice wasn’t echoing through the halls and what if he got hurt or ran away, yet even though she knew he wasn’t hurt and she knew he was still there she still couldn’t shake the feeling. And he did his chores in silence and could sit hours without saying anything and it was especially in those moments that he wasn’t the Davenport she knew. Sometimes, he could be in the room and without his voice she wouldn’t realize he was there, and he’d have to walk up to her and tap her to get her attention, if she didn’t bump into him first.  
And other times, she’d find him sweeping to a beat he didn’t know, or swinging his feet while sitting, or tapping his fingers on the table, and she wondered if there was a song in his head he didn’t know was there, just waiting for him to discover it.

But little did she know he’d always feel like something important was missing, and spend most of his long showers distracted, too deep into the mess that was his own head to be aware of reality. He’d get stressed while doing his chores, trying to find something to concentrate on, and he’d find himself bored out of his mind when he was done; and the silence was killing him, it dug deep within his brain only to hit the static within his memory, and the silence and the fuzziness turned his mind into a battlefield as he struggled to figure out which of them bothered him more.  
And little did he know that it was Lucretia filling the silence that made him feel so comfortable around her, that her pen scratching against paper or the click of her shoes when she was about to leave the ship or the staticky sounds of her bedtime stories replaced everything that worried him. And he learned from it, as the first year went by; he realized that there was a way to make everything interesting, to make every experience full of joy, and so he started doing so. He heard and noticed and picked up everything, starting to notice the sounds of the crickets at night or the wind on the deck while they were flying or the flipping of pages in a book, and he started making his own sound, distracting himself in whatever way he could. 

And then, Davenport slept in one day - that nightmare kept him up, and he was tired - and he walked into the kitchen, dazed and still tired, only to see Lucretia doing the dishes, singing static. And when he walked up to her, intrigued about it, she smiled softly and said, “Davenport, you’re awake - should I make you breakfast?”  
He shook his head but didn’t move from under her, and when she noticed he was still there she picked him up and put him on the kitchen counter next to her and asked, “What is it?”  
He took a minute to get the word out, pointing to her before realizing she wasn’t getting it and then trying harder before eventually saying “S-static?”  
“Oh - you weren’t able to hear that song, weren’t you?”  
He seemed confused for a moment, then nodded.  
She thought about it. “You know what? Go make yourself breakfast, and I’ll try to sing something you can hear.”  
He nodded again, then hopped off of the counter, and she started to sing. And she sang while he was making his breakfast and she sang the song again as she put the now-washed dishes away, and he took in every moment of it, every note, even though he didn’t quite catch the words. And when he sat alone in the shower that night he tried to make those same notes but he couldn’t quite do it, so he played the tune in his head over and over again and then tried again when he was in his room and again when he finished cleaning and plopped down on the couch, but then Lucretia walked in and saw him and asked “Are you trying to say something?”  
And he shook his head and tried again, but it didn’t work that time either.  
“So if you’re not trying to say a word, then…” She thought about it for a moment; and then it clicked, and she laughed softly and sat on the couch next to him. “You’re trying to sing, then?”  
He beamed, and nodded, and it got a real genuine laugh out of her that time.   
“Have you tried humming it yet?”  
“Davenport?”  
She hummed the first line to the lullaby - he just now realized it was one - she sang yesterday. “Now try and copy me.”  
He thought about it for a bit, and then tried for a little longer, and then got out the first note; and he smiled, again, that big one that he did whenever he got a word out, and then hummed that note and then next one again, to prove that he could.  
And she smiled, and it was somehow both real and sad at the same time. “After some practice, you’ll be able to get it all! And then you can sing it to yourself, or to me.”  
He nodded, and then picked up one of the books he liked to skim through when he wanted to hear the pages flip, and hummed while he actually read it for the first time.

~

“Davenport, I’d like you to meet someone, okay?”  
He seemed confused, for a moment - he hadn’t met someone new in a long time, and normally when he did he had to leave the ship to do so - but then nodded, and took her hand when she offered it.  
And then they went down the stairs, and Lucretia took a key out of her pocket and unlocked a room he just then realized he hadn’t been in before, and as Davenport looked at the room in awe _~~Fisher~~_ the big thing that was in the tank that took up most of the room sang a couple of notes to him, and he ran to the glass and looked through it and then back at Lucretia.  
“Davenport, this is _~~Fisher.”~~_  
“Static?”  
“Oh - _~~shit I forgot I erased that~~_ \- well. You don’t need to know their name anyway.” She laughed, but a more awkward one. “But I thought, since you wanted to learn how to sing…”  
He smiled, and when Fisher sang a few more notes he hummed them back, and then he sat down next to the tank and they kept going and it almost turned into a game, where Fisher sang and Davenport copied him back and in some way, they became a friend.  
And then, under Lucretia’s careful supervision, Davenport started coming back: he came back when he needed to practice saying Lucretia’s name, or when he got a song from the radio stuck in his head, or just when he wanted to look into the constellations that made up their body, and they were the friend that Davenport could have fun with, the one that could always, somehow, understand how he felt or what he was trying to say or what he was going through. So he came down there, but it wasn’t until much later when Lucretia gave him the ichor (and Fisher’s name) that the door to the room stayed open; and when it did, when he tried it for the first time and it swung open, he sat down and started singing. He sang, and he sang, even though all he really said was his name, and he knew that Fisher knew what he was singing about - though new recruits were confused, for a long time after, why they heard a song with no words in the midst of their inoculation.

~

When they moved into the moon base, Lucretia got him a radio for his room. “It’s a gift,” she said, “for all those birthdays I missed.”  
Davenport ran up to it, leaned over his desk, and messed with the knobs and all it made was static, and he smiled and pointed to it and said “Static!”  
And she laughed, only then realizing that it must have sounded like voidfish interference, and went up to it and turned them to the right frequency and when it started playing music his smile grew even bigger.   
“That’s what a radio’s supposed to do - but if you ever want to use it to make the static, I guess you can do that as well.”  
He laughed too, and then hopped onto his bed and spent the rest of the day just sitting there with the radio on, and Lucretia left him to his peace.

(When she came back that night, Davenport had opened the back of the radio, and spent the rest of the night tinkering with the wires inside, singing his name while he did it. She didn’t know what he did to make it that way, but from that day on, it was the only radio on the base that could play a channel from the face of the planet opposite the one the moon was on.)

~

A few days after the Day of Story and Song, Davenport tried to sing again.  
He knew he had trouble speaking after ten years with no memory and it made him nervous, he didn’t want to try in fear that he would have to stop himself, but in the shower no one could hear him stutter, so he tried. He tried and he found himself singing both old songs and new, from the song Lucretia liked that he heard as static back on the Starblaster to ones he heard Angus hum as he walked through the Bureau halls, and eventually he got louder, and more confident, and he sang through his anxiety and sang through his fear and sang through it all, and eventually it echoed through the base like it echoed through the ship long ago -   
And Lucretia, having fallen asleep on her desk, woke up with a start, and then smiled, because through it all, she had missed his singing.

**Author's Note:**

> You know that "Davenport, read the room!" scene? The one that's supposed to be funny?  
> It makes you sad too now, right?
> 
> Also, just think about Davenport and Fisher being friends for a bit more, because that scene in this is not as well fleshed out as I'd like it to be but I'm too tired to add to it. But it's a very good concept, and I'm still thinking about it, so please do.
> 
> One last thing - I might come back and add to this later? It's slightly shorter than I'd like it to be, especially in the last two scenes, but my brain is dead tired. So, half-expect to see more, and let me know if you think of anything to add!  
> I'll see you all on the flip side~


End file.
